Origin of the Pilgrim

There is no decisive evidence as to the exact date when the
custom of pilgrimages to the Holy Land first
obtained in the Christian Church. To the early Christians Jerusalem may well
have seemed the city of the wrath rather than of the love of God. To them it
was rather the scene of the death than of the resurrection of Christ, and its
sacred associations were perhaps obliterated in horror at its profanation with
heathen worship under the Roman name of Aelia Capitolina.

­ But when Christianity found a champion in Constantine the
Great, Jerusalem
began to raise its head among the cities of the world. The piety of this Emperor
or his mother, Helena, built churches on the traditional scenes of Our Lord's
birth and burial ; traditional only, since the almost coeval legend of the
Invention of the Cross shows clearly that all exact knowledge had been . lost.
Constantine himself is credited with the intention of a visit to the Holy Land, and from this time we can trace the history of
the sacred pilgrimages from century to century. That emperor was yet alive when
a pilgrim from Bordeaux made the journey by land
to Jerusalem,
and left a record which still survives. In the Holy City
he saw the pool of Solomon, the pinnacle whence Satan tempted Christ to throw
Himself, and the little hill of Golgotha, which was the scene of the Crucifixion.
At other places, too, he notes with care whatever events in Scripture history
had made them famous. Clearly men were already seeking to identify the chief scenes
of the sacred narrative, although in their credulity they were ready to accept whatever
absurdities invention might offer ; such, for instance, as the sycamore tree
into which Zacchaeus had climbed.

­ By the end of the fourth century the practice pilgrimages
had so much increased as to give rise to the custom of collecting alms for the
relief of the poor at Jerusalem.
It was well, contended St. Jerome,
that men should reverence holy shrines and relics. That saint himself, when
forced to leave Rome, made his home in the Holy Land, and there his noble
patroness, Paula, came to see him, and visit in his company Elijah's tower at
Sarepta, the house of Cornelius at Caesarea, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Hebron.
Paula herself wrote afterwards to her friend Marcella : " We do not doubt
that there are holy men elsewhere than here, but it is here that the foremost of
the whole world are gathered together. Here are Gauls and Britons, Persians and
Armenians, Indians and ^Ethiopians, all dwelling in love and harmony." In
Jerome's time Jerusalem
already possessed so many sacred places that the stranger could not visit them
in a single day. A hundred and fifty years later, after the city had been
adorned by the splendid buildings of Justinian, they cannot have been less in number.